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This study aims to investigate the impact of energy access on foreign direct investment (FDI) in an emerging market.

The study uses the two-stage least square instrumental variables estimation approach to compute the parameters of the model to account for any potential endogeneity and time persistence in energy access.

The results show that energy access significantly influences FDI inflows in Ghana. The results of the study also revealed that natural resources and macroeconomic variables such as real interest rate, gross domestic product growth rate are significant determinants of FDI inflows in Ghana.

The practical implication of this study is that there is a need for energy sector policy reforms in Ghana that would guarantee a secured and continued supply of energy to enhance energy access to boost FDI. Ghana should aim for a cost-effective, stable and environmentally friendly source of energy as an alternative to hydro energy as the main source of its power generation to promote FDI. Also, Ghana should initiate and implement policies aimed at creating an enabling and stable macroeconomic environment, as macroeconomic factors in this study are found to be drivers of FDI.

This study provides firsthand information on energy access and FDI from the Ghanaian perspective.

The purpose of this study is to understand the driving forces of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence organizations’ “license to operate” using data from the Ghanaian business environment.

This study used purposive sampling with a well-structured questionnaire as a data collection tool. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to study the driving forces of CSR initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence their social license.

The findings indicate that CSR initiatives are driven by the normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures. The regulative pressure has no significant effect on CSR initiatives. The authors found no difference between the services and the manufacturing sectors as far as the results are concerned using multi-grouping analysis.

From the results, the importance of normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures as the driving forces of CSR are established. The finding indicates that CSR demands by suppliers, customers the extent to which organizations perceive their competitors have benefited from initiating CSR are benefiting, the willingness of investors to invest in companies whose CSR activities are best and the opinion on the extent to which the District Assembly and the Chief Executive in the district, the Chiefs, the Churches, the Opinion leaders have significant impact on CSR initiatives.

The results indicate the need for suppliers and customers to continually demand from corporations to initiate CSR activities as organizations seem to respond to these pressures, and these initiatives are also likely to be mimicked by other organizations in the same industry to enable this drive the social responsibility agenda. Investors and community members are also encouraged to invest and accept, respectively, organizations with very good CSR records to send a signal to companies who see CSR as a cost instead of performance enhancement.

The work illustrates and provides some insights and builds on the literature in the area of CSR from a developing country’s environment. This is also one of the few works that investigate the driving forces of CSR and social license using the institutional theory based on data from the African business environment.